PAKISTAN
• As of 27 July (NDMA), due to the recent floods, there were: 69 death, 36 people injured and over 290,000 people affected.
• Over the next 48 h, widespread rains (locally heavy) are forecast for most of the country, maintaining the risk of further flash flooding in the already affected areas. As of 28 July (PMD), significant flood is forecast for river Indus at Taunsa on 30-31 July.

DFID funded research is helping to build more open, better networked societies through the use of digital technologies. The ICT4D programme, which was co-funded with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), examined the positive and negative impacts that ICT can have on the lives of the poor. Research findings are helping to inform emerging policy that looks to empower the world’s poorest people through technology.

Persons with disabilities often experience discrimination and exclusion, despite the adoption of an increasingly rights-based approach to humanitarian assistance. The past three decades have witnessed a growing awareness of disability issues and the emergence and spread of disabled people’s organisations.

The growing awareness must be accompanied by practical measures to identify and reduce the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in an emergency situation.

From Ebola to the bombing of Gaza, civil society was the first responder to humanitarian emergencies during the last year, but faces dire threats and a funding crisis around the world, says a new report.

“During the last year civil society was everywhere, doing great work often at the frontline of the world’s challenges, but at the same time having to stave off threats to its very existence,” said Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, the CIVICUS Secretary-General on launching the organisation’s 2015 State of Civil Society Report.

Human influence on the earth’s land surface is a global driver of ecological processes on the planet, en par with climatic trends, geological forces and astronomical variations. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University joined together to systematically map and measure the human influence on the earth’s land surface today.

This map shows the average amount of precipitation falling in a year, based on approximately 50 years of data. The figures shown do not therefore represent the amount of precipitation that may occur in any given year.

Using an innovative approach with GIS and remote sensing, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory LandScanTM is the community standard for global population distribution. At approximately 1 km resolution LandScan is the finest resolution global population distribution data available and represents an ambient population (average over 24 hours).

Temperatures in the Asia-Pacific region can go very high with central India reaching 50oC or more. The Tibetan plateau rarely exceeds 20oC because of its high elevation.

These temperatures are based on average highs over a period of approximately 50 years. Maximum temperatures in the region may therefore be from different months of the year and a temperature in any given location may exceed these maximums.

In the last seven years, an estimated one person every second has been displaced by a disaster, with 19.3 million people forced to flee their homes in 2014 alone. Disaster displacement is on the rise, and as policy leaders worldwide advance towards the adoption of a post-2015 global agenda, the time has never been better to address it.